Shiver Me Timbers

GET IT!? BECAUSE IT’S STILL A WOOD PUN, BUT IT’S ALSO A BOAT PUN!

Well, it’s been a pretty weak week on the hobby front for me, but what about those Deepkin, eh?

But the hobby first. Calendron, the god of appointments, turned his baleful eye on upon me this week and I’ve been out every evening being uncharacteristically sociable, so as a result I’ve not had a whole lot of time to paint. I did however manage to get in a couple of games in a nascent Gloomhaven campaign, which is great, and in the long-running Pendragon campaign I play in my character managed to rake in the glory fighting a opponent who far outmatched him, but holding out long enough to yield with honour. Next time, our merry band of knights will be heading into the countryside of Somerset to burn and pillage our way through a whole lot of peasant villages. Because peasants don’t count where honour is concerned.

But I digress. I’ve been painting my Nestorian Infestation civilians in the hour or so I could catch each evening. I had to repaint all the armour and fabrics because I didn’t like how they first turned out, so it’s been slow going. They’re getting there now, but there’s still a good few hours work to go. Still hopeful I’ll get them done in time for BigBossRedSkull’s game. Here’s an icky WIP photo. It’s best if you just scroll past. Really, you don’t need to look. Move along.

Here, Nico Grillet finished his bunch this week, and they’re gorgeous. He even made a fancy box for them, the talented git. Look at them instead.

But let’s talk about the big news this week.

By now I’ve no doubt that most of you will have seen the Idoneth Deepkin reveal from Adepticon. It’s certainly all that Warhammer Twitter seems to be talking about. As you can probably tell from my generally jovial tone, I’m quite a fan. I’m definitely going to be picking some of these up, and I think they’ll be a wonderful companion army to my Sylvaneth. Maybe paint up the skin tones the same as my Branchwych for that underwater bioluminescent look, and go for lots of nice blues and greens and rich browns for the fabrics.

I love what GW are doing with the aelves in AoS. They’ve really become their own thing with the end of the Old World. No longer are they just the Tolkien knock-offs that were par for the course across fantasy properties back in the 80’s. Now there are all these broken fragments of a once beautiful and proud culture, twisted and tortured over the aeons into something tragic and damned, and for my money, much more interesting. Not all are monstrous, but we have the half-tree Revenants, the half-snake Melusai, the half-daemon Khinerai, and now these pale, blind creatures, not mutated cross-breeds, but certainly less than a whole. The accompanying text on the Community website calls them soul-stealing reavers, so perhaps they lack souls of their own. Teclis’s first attempts at recreating the elves of the World That Was obviously didn’t go as planned. And look closely at that photo above: the shark riders and that character have flesh-coloured skin. Perhaps this is an aelven society divided between a souled elite and a soulless underclass of failed, haunted experiments.

AoS had a rocky start, with little context and a lot of hammy fluff. It’s finding its feet now though. The mortal realms have as much scope as the 40k universe for GW (not to mention the players) to do whatever they want, and GW has enough competent writing talent to crank out some really good world-building when they want to. They don’t print the names of the authors in the army books anymore, but I suspect the steady hand of Phil Kelly has been guiding the tiller on the AoS boat recently. And of course, the models!

It’s somewhat trite to say that we’re in a golden age of miniatures as I’m sure the quality will keep getting better and better, but AoS has allowed the miniature designers to really cut loose and craft their own creations, not limited by historical motifs and Tolkienesque clichés. (Just to be clear, I love me some Tolkien, but GW can and should be doing their own thing, and they’re much better for it.) Not everything will be a hit for every person for sure, but we’re really spoilt for choice these days.

I was wondering what the best way to work some of the humanoid aelves into my Slyvaneth gang was, so I’m going to be all over these Deepkin. Can’t wait to get my hands on them, and I can’t wait to see what horrors have been spawned from all the other poor, tormented aelven souls that get hoovered out of Slaanesh’s big fat belly.

‘Til next time.

 

~ Ross